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Does your workspace inspire you to greatness?
If you’re a designer, one of the best things you can do to stay productive and prevent creative stagnation is to craft your workspace into a place that you will be excited to work in everyday. Below you’ll find a few tips and a bunch of examples to help you create the ultimate working environment.
Children’s books are a great gift to the world, and are often credited with developing children’s minds and talents. Despite their moniker, however, simple stories can be inspirational for adults as well, and designers and illustrators in particular. The simplicity and fresh perspectives that quality children’s literature gives can seldom be found elsewhere.
It happens to all of us. You’re cruising along pretending to work while perusing design blogs when all of a sudden your Internet connection disappears.
The first thing you do is give in to your natural reaction to any semi-significant event: tweet about it. Unfortunately, you quickly realize this requires the Internet; blast. Then you start to Google the phone number to your ISP only to realize that this too requires a connection to the web; curse you technological revolution!
You look around for a phone book in vain, knowing for certain that you haven’t used one since Clinton was in office. Finally, you remember that the last time this happened you wrote the number on a piece of paper and put it somewhere on or around your desk.
After no small amount of scrounging and wondering aloud why you didn’t put the number into your phone’s address book, you discover the note and dial the number of your service provider who then informs you that you will be without the Internet for the better part of the day. Now what?
How do you begin building a website?
The majority of developers probably start from scratch or pull in a few resources from previous sites. The more organized among us have developed a custom toolbox from which to begin a site that proves to be an essential part of their workflow.
Today we’ll discuss why you should consider building your own front end package to serve as a starting point for every single site you create.
Recently we discussed how to find work as a designer, today we’re going to discuss what to do if that search is a little too successful.
Getting noticed in an industry as competitive and overcrowded as web design is no mean feat. In order to stand out, first impressions need to be both targeted and executed to perfection.
To provide an insight into how it should be done, we’ve compiled a list of 25 of the most beautifully designed web agency sites. These amazing sites all have that “wow factor”, displaying cutting edge design alongside marketing savoir-faire. They are conscious of their target clientele, whether it’s large corporations or personal clients, presenting an understanding of their needs.
Boring paperwork is one of the necessary evils of being a freelance designer.
There’s simply no way around it, if you want to track and manage payments from clients, you’re going to have to setup an invoicing system. It’s not all bad news though; the fun part is that you actually get to design a custom invoice.
Today we’ll walk through designing an invoice from scratch. I’ll be as in-depth as possible and include everything you need to know from the absolute basics to advanced features and even a little design theory.
When Smashing Magazine first announced the release of their book, I have to confess that I was slightly sceptical. I enjoy their blog regularly, but didn’t really see how the concept would carry across to a book – or what topics it would cover.
I’ve spent a few hours reading through my review copy over the past week, and have been pleasantly surprised. Sven and Vitaly have managed to bring several talented writers on board to help put together a thoroughly interesting read.
This review will walk you through the book’s contents, and outline a few of the chapters I particularly enjoyed!
There is no shortage of companies that follow popular design trends to appeal to a mass market. Much more rare is the breed of company that actually sets design trends. Today we’ll examine the techniques of a company that occupies the top of the design food chain: Apple.
Below you’ll find 15 practical ways to follow Apple’s example in creating beautiful interfaces.
Congratulations to our randomly selected winner, Marc DeCarli. We hope you enjoy the book and want to thank everyone who entered. We’ll have another competition coming soon!
That’s right, it’s time for another amazing giveaway. Are you excited? I hope so.
Read on to find out how you can win a copy of the the excellent book Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton.
A site with fixed-position navigation is one that never allows the user to lose site of the directory links as they scroll.
This simple trick makes for a site that is incredibly easy to navigate and is ideally suited for specific types of content. Below we’ll take a look at both the most common and the most unique uses of fixed navigation in web design.
So you want to be a freelancer, now what?
Despite the glamorous reputation, freelance design is no walk in the park. It takes an incredible work ethic, significant entrepreneurial prowess, and a little bit of insanity to pull it off effectively. This article will discuss how to effectively make a living as a freelancer (designer or otherwise). Since we are in fact a design blog, I’ll scatter in some well-designed freelancer sites along the way for inspiration.